


Potrait

by ap_trash_compactor



Series: Instant Film [3]
Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Christmas fic, F/M, Modern AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 20:58:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17148980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ap_trash_compactor/pseuds/ap_trash_compactor
Summary: Sometimes it takes a minute for our decisions to catch up to us. (That doesn't mean they're bad.)





	Potrait

Arihnda wakes to the sound of shrill, small voices echoing down the hall. For a few minutes, she tries not to get up at all. She buries herself against Thrawn: nestles into the warmth of him and warmth of the blankets and closes her eyes resolutely.

The sounds in the hallway go on: the heavier thud of adult feet and the lower tones of adult voices join in.

Thrawn rubs Arihnda’s back with one hand. It’s a pleasant sensation, and almost as intimate as they’ve been in spite of the shared bed. Arihnda is quite cognizant of the presence of sharp little ears and very thin walls. More than that, there is the lingering strain of the past few weeks. Her coming here has helped, but there is still a crack between them: a place where cold air gets in.

“Time to get up, I think,” Thrawn murmurs.

Arihnda makes a groan of protest, half-hearted, and cracks an eye. Her right hand is lying on Thrawn’s chest, and on her right ring finger…

It’s sparkling in the light: the ring. A gift for himself, he'd called it. The weight still feels strange on her finger. It’s a promise, sort of -- or at least a statement of tentative intent -- to keep doing this, whatever it is, for another year.

Arihnda wonders vaguely if Maris, whoever she'd been, had been a gift from Thrawn to himself as well. There is still so much, she realizes, that she doesn’t know about the man beside her.

But she hadn't wanted to say to no him, to this, with his family so close by -- even if she thinks he would have kept any rebuff quiet, only between the two of them.

She lifts her hand a little to take a closer look at the ring.

“Regretting it already?” he asks wryly.

“No,” she says, with distracted honesty. “No, I —”

In the hall, there is a loud noise and childish screaming.

Arihnda reconsiders briefly. “I’m not regretting it  _ much,”  _ she says.

Thrawn laughs, then starts to sit up. “Come. Thrass always makes breakfast for this. He might be a better cook than I am.”

“Oh,” she says, pushing herself up alongside him, “I don’t want to miss that.”

“No, and I don’t want to miss the presents. I plan on playing the role of Saint Nick.”

“You might have more enthusiasm for this holiday than anyone except my mother,” Arihnda mutters.

“I like it a great deal,” says Thrawn, pulling on his pajamas. He never seems to get into bed wearing them. “It is a chance to spend time with my family. And I would like to see how my nieces and nephews react to the gifts I have chosen for them.”

“No, clearly, I understand that. I just…” So much she doesn't know. She sits on the edge of the bed. “I’m just wondering where all this comes from, is all. Your mother doesn’t seem like she’d be into all this.”

“No, she is not,” he allows.

“And you and Thrass were raised apart.”

Thrawn pauses, and tilts his head. “I was a late adopter, I admit.”

“I never asked about your names, either,” Arihnda says, easing around her real question. She is still perched on the edge of the bed, her feet hovering above the cold wood floor.

“No,” says Thrawn, “you did not.” He looks around the room, and retrieves her slippers from near the door. “You notice his nickname does not match his real name, as mine does?”

“Yes,” she says.

Thrawn kneels and tucks one of her feet into a slipper.

She puts a hand on his shoulder. “Thrawn…”

He stops, holding her other foot, and looks up. “You will not be dissuaded?”

“Your mother didn’t say anything, about your father. I was just… wondering.”

“I never knew him,” Thrawn says. His voice is flat, like he is giving a recitation of boring verse. “Some of his looks, a little my mother could tell me about his people, a name from their language; that is all I have. I gave Thrass his nickname because I thought it was… similar to my name. Like something he might have been named if we had had the same father. Is that what you were wondering?”

He doesn’t seem inclined to say more of his own accord, but he looks like he might be willing to answer another question. Not with enthusiasm, maybe, but directly.

Instead of asking more, Arihnda leans forward a little, almost like she is sussing out her options, and puts her arms around him, cautiously -- loosely.

After a minute, he puts his arms loosely around her, in return.

She nestles her face in his neck and squeezes him, and after a much shorter hesitation he wraps his arms closer around her as well, rising up onto his knees so their bodies are pressed together.

Arihnda can feel the strange new weight of the ring.

Suddenly, she digs her fingers into him, and clutches her arms around him as hard as she can, and he grips her back, equally fierce and just as sudden.

She feels own heartbeat thudding in her ears, feels her face burning, feels like perhaps all the things she still doesn't know don't matter so much, after all. Maybe they won't ever matter if she can hold him tightly enough  _ \-- _

There’s a crash from the kitchen, and shrieking, and exasperated, mostly good-natured, shouting, and in their room suddenly Thrawn and Arihnda are apart from each other.

He is laughing -- she is wiping at a sudden excess of wetness in her eyes -- he is taking her face in his hands and kissing her lightly--

There’s another wave of shrill sound from the rest of the cabin, and then Thrawn and Arihnda are both laughing, together, and he is standing, and holding her hand--

“Come,” he says, grinning, “we should rescue my brother from his family.”

“Wait,” she says, “my slippers --”

~*~

Thrass is not a better cook than Thrawn, but he’s good enough. And Lorana is happy, really, it seems, to have a little female companionship for herself and her two daughters in the face of her husband, his brother, and her three sons.

Thrawn alone of the adults seems able to wrangle the children with ease. They all obviously adore him beyond words: are eager for his attention and willing to do whatever he requests to have a better chance of keeping it. The only dramas erupt when one or another of them wants to wrest his attention away from the others.

Arihnda finds herself charmed by the weird little ballet in spite of her her lack of affinity for children. She still doesn’t really know what they’re saying when they talk to her -- it all sounds like utter nonsense -- and therefore has no idea what she’s expected to say back, but they seem to accept her offerings good-naturedly and mostly aren’t very interested in her. They all call her Miss Rinna, but run it together as  _ mizrinna _ , and generally just want to make sure she has seen whatever gift Thrawn has given them. She and Thrawn exchange a few ironic smiles over the tops of small heads through the course of the morning that feel, somehow, much warmer than they should, but there isn’t much time to dwell on the feeling.

Thrawn’s oldest niece, Georgiana, is only one who is not excessively verbal. She is, in fact, rather the opposite, and though she seems sharply attentive, she only makes a big noise once: when she unwraps the gigantic stuffed unicorn that Thrawn had, in the end, decided to buy for her. She hugs Thrawn for so long that her siblings start kicking the floor in impatient frustration, and when she shows off her prize to the other adults in the room she insists on hugging each of them in turn as well, including Arihnda.

Arihnda finds she doesn’t mind that at all.

Eventually, they run out of presents to open. Shortly after that, one of the boys starts talking about skiing.

It’s like a virus; soon they are all demanding to go out.

“You should go,” Thrawn says to Lorana, who is trying to deescalate the crisis. “I will clean up the leavings here,” he adds, gesturing broadly at the carnage of paper and boxes. “And I can make dinner.”

“You’re sure?” says Lorana, touching his shoulder. “We can just go out a little later.”

“I’m sure.”

“Arihnda?” says Lorana, turning to look at her. “Do you want to come?”

“I think I’ll stay here and help, thanks,” she says, smiling a little. “Maybe do the laundry?” It’s easier than explaining that she doesn’t know how to ski. She’s sure the Safis brood will descend on her, determined to change things, if she admits it, and she has another week and a half to decide if she’s ready for that.

“Alright,” says Lorana, a little skeptically, “you two stay here alone then.”

“I’m sure they’ll manage with just each other for company,” says Thrass.

“Oh, shush,” says Lorana, a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.

Everything after that is about bundling five excitable children into ski gear and out the door.

Thrawn manages to get most of the living room squared away while that’s happening, and Arihnda sticks close by him. When his brother’s family finally trundles out the door, he moves on to the kitchen.

“Would you like to help, as it were, in here?” he asks, with a less-than-innocent smile.

It’s tempting, but -- “No, I think I really will help out with the laundry,” Arihnda says. “It seems like the least I can do.”

The smile fades from Thrawn’s features, and he shrugs. “Suit yourself. Lorana will not begrudge you if you don’t; they’re not your children.”

“I know,” says Arihnda. And she does know he’s right about Lorana. But Lorana’s been more than kind the past few days, and Arihnda does want to do something to help.

~*~

She starts by gathering up the discarded clothes in the room where she and Thrawn are staying. He is, it turns out, an absolute slob when he’s allowed to be, and she’s been following his example.

She tosses things in the hamper, one after the other: socks, underwear -- his and hers both tangled together on the floor like some sort of joke -- pajamas, pants. Eventually she picks up the shirt of the working uniform he’d been wearing the night they’d arrived.

Something in a pocket crinkles beneath her grasp when she picks it up. Frowning, she fishes in the pocket.

And stares at what she finds.

The first weekend they’d spent together -- the very first weekend they’d gone on a date -- Thrawn had taken half a box’s worth of polaroids of her, in various states of undress, in the bed and out of it, and she’d taken a couple pictures of him. It had been fun -- the whole weekend had been fun -- and at the end, he’d asked her if he could take one of the pictures as a memento.  _ I will give you final say over which one, of course, but -- _

She’d agreed to the first one he’d chosen. It was modest enough. A little emotionally intimate, maybe, but not too embarrassing. He’d caught her just at the end of a laugh: she couldn’t remember for the life of her what he’d said, but it must have been as alluring as it was funny because the relaxed, happy version of herself she sees in the picture -- wrapped in a bedsheet, propped lazily up on one elbow -- is looking at the man taking the picture with as much desire as amusement. It’s a wonderful picture, really: sincere, alive, captured with a tender gaze.

And it had been in his pocket. The pocket of the uniform he’d worn traveling here, all the way from the other side of the world.

She stands there in the middle of the room, and holds the photo, and stares.

Then she hears footsteps moving down the hall, and Thrawn saying: “Arihnda? Arihnda -- wait --”

He comes into the room just slow enough that she wouldn’t describe him as “bursting in,” but only barely. She holds up the photograph. She’s not quite sure what expression her face is making. She’s not quite sure what expression she’s  _ supposed  _ to be making.

“Did you --” she says -- “you --”

Stopped in the doorway, he looks as uncertain as she feels. “I was coming to make sure you did not put it in the wash,” he says. He makes a very good attempt at preserving his dignity while he speaks.

“You took this with you to Iraq?” she asks.

There isn’t any trace of his usual sardonic humor in his face or voice when he answers. When he speaks, it’s with a quiet sincerity that’s come out more and more the past few months.

“I take it with me everywhere.”

~*~

In the end, the laundry does not get done and dinner does not get made, not until well after Thrass and Lorana return, their children tearing through the cabin like a mad horde.

From the hall, Thrawn and Arihnda hear loud, piping voices asking where  _ Uncle Tron  _ and  _ Mizrinna  _ are. Someone rattles their door before Lorana puts the pieces together and herds the concerned and demanding little interlopers away.

Twined together in their bed, warm in the afterglow of the first time they’ve had sex since November, Thrawn and Arihnda find themselves, once again, laughing -- and then, winding their way closer still, they communicate gently through soft, quiet signs that are not laughter.

~*~

When they finally emerge, Thrawn is dragged into to the kitchen by his nieces and nephews, and is clearly delighted by the entire procedure. 

He catches Arihnda’s eye as he’s corralling the noisy flock into being his little sous-chefs for the evening, and grins. It only lasts a second: then one of the children tugs at his arm, and he is entirely theirs again. Watching him, Arihnda feels a swell of affection so sharp it seems almost more like grief than love.

~*~

Towards the end of the trip, Lorana insists that Arihnda be included in at least one family portrait. They use an old camera with a timer, and Arihnda helps set up the lighting and adjust the lens. Thrass takes the film to be developed in the closest town. On the last day of the trip, Lorana gives Thrawn and Arihnda a single framed print of her favorite photo from the batch.

The children are smiling like it’s a competition. Thrass and Lorana, in the middle of their brood, look more happy and proud than exhausted. Slightly behind behind them all, just past Thrass’ right shoulder, Thrawn and Arihnda stand close together. Her arms are around herself almost protectively, but she is smiling quite genuinely at the camera. Thrawn has one arm around her shoulders, the other propped arrogantly on his hip. He, too, is smiling.

He is not looking at the camera.


End file.
